Indoor location for iOS with iBeacons

Are you planning to deploy iBeacons at your venue? How would you like to use them to provide indoor location–not just proximity–for iPhones and iPads? Accuware has released an iOS app that does it. And you can try it for free.

Accuware Wearabouts for iOS uses iBeacons’ signals not just to trigger proximity events, but to deliver actual location coordinates. You can now follow the whereabouts of participating devices as they move about in your site.

What can you do with Wearabouts?

Here is a typical application that makes good use of Wearabouts.

A museum decides to provide its visitors with a unique experience that will entice them to undertake a journey of exploration and discovery. Visitors can select from various curated routes and follow their interests, finding key items in various collections, deep diving into history, relevant facts, contextual information and related items.

Tablets loaded with apps are available for checkout. iPads make ideal companions for the journey. Strategically placed iBeacons mark the location of key exhibits, enabling the right contextual information to display as visitors approach them. Items available nearby are highlighted. User’s queries return facts and location of related items in the collection. The route is not rigid, as exploration requires a flexible itinerary that can be adjusted on the fly.

Every day, museum curators and staff will want to learn what routes are the most popular, which sections the most visited and which spaces are skipped. How much time do visitors spend, and where do they dwell. In other words, quantifying visitors’ journeys delivers insights and informs of the best organization of these spaces to maximize engagement.

A Wearabouts app running on every tablet collects the raw data for understanding visitors’ behavior. The time-stamped sequence of locations the iPads take throughout the day provides the trail of breadcrumbs that enables the analysis. From now on, exhibit layout decisions will be based on actual data. As a bonus, no tablet can disappear without a trace.

Indoor location in iOS

Similar applications are possible when using gamification, such as in event marketing. Guiding visitors at a trade show to learn about new products and discover their features is a journey that can be enhanced with indoor location, by dispensing contextual information in the right sequence based on the user’s route. Another common use is in games like treasure hunt.

Device location can be the driver in these cases. Indoor location enables also geofencing, when user activities must be constrained within a virtual boundary, as often required in gaming.

Many other location-aware applications are possible, such as locating doctors and nurses in a large hospital, finding staff members across a multi-story office building, or locating family members (children!) in a large venue. Any device running iOS 8 (or higher) is supported.

Note that users’ privacy is never compromised in any way, as the collection of location data is completely anonymous.

Getting started

Want to take Wearabouts for a spin? Just a few steps will get you there:

Contact Accuware to request a testing account.

Download and install the Accuware Indoors iOS This one is required for fingerprinting ambient iBeacon signals

Download and install the Accuware Wearabouts app on every device to be located. Each and every Device ID must be registered at the site via the online dashboard.

Fingerprint the venue. Use the Quick Start Guide for step-by-step guidance.

Please note that Bluetooth Beacon Tracker, WiFi Location Monitor and Wearabouts have been removed from our offer as standalone technologies. They still may be used to complement our current products Sentinel and Dragonfly whenever that would be needed.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.Ok